Smule smushes together with Khush

Smule, the fast-growing maker of music applications for iOS, is adding a new player to its ensemble.

The Palo Alto startup announced Thursday that it has acquired Khush, an Atlanta startup whose music app Songify was a No.1 bestseller in the iTunes store this year. It is Smule’s first acquisition.

Terms of the deal, which the founders codenamed “Smush” after a portmanteau of their names, were not disclosed.

“These folks have very creative technology that opens up music creation to everyone,” said Jeff Smith, Smule’s co-founder and CEO. “That’s a goal we share between the companies. Our goal is to ultimately democratize the creation and distribution of music — put these tools into a billion people’s hands and see what they do with it.”

The companies share academic origins. Smule co-founder Ge Wang is an assistant professor at Stanford in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Khush co-founder Parag Chordia is a professor of computer music at Georgia Tech. Wang and Chordia have collaborated on research in the past.

Smith said the acquisition represents an effort to grow Smule’s user base in the face of growing competition in the music app space. But the company has a head start on any rivals: apps created by Smule and Khush have been downloaded nearly 30 million times, and its users have created more than 350 million pieces of content in three years.

Smule’s popular apps include Ocarina, which converts iPhones into flute-like instruments, and the more self-explanatory Magic Piano. Both apps have been downloaded more than 6 million times. Khush’s Songify, which turns users’ spoken words into songs, has been downloaded more than 5 million times.

“Sometimes there’s skepticism around the idea — do people really care about being creative? Do people really care about creating music?” said Prerna Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Khush. “Both Smule and Khush have always believed the answer to that is yes, and we’re starting to see that borne out by the numbers. What I’ve seen over and over again is if you make it easy enough, people have a pent-up desire to express themselves creatively. They just don’t think they can do it.”

Smule, which has 33 employees, recently opened an eight-person San Francisco office at 300 Brannan. The seven-person Khush team will remain in Atlanta.

The companies celebrated the acquisition by creating one of the better M&A videos you’ll ever seen, a loving tribute to the legendary “Double Rainbow” video created by the Gregory Brothers.